thank you for sharing this story of the fawn. i , too, had an experience with a very young fawn this year. it got into my garden and could not find its way out. it allowed me to pick it up and bring it to it's mother. now i see that this fawn has two siblings. and i watch with such pleasure and gratitude as they run thru my woods. yes, the world has lost it's way, but i know that there is great light on this planet at this time and we can find our way back together.
I read this and my heart opened with the truth revealed. I have two sons who live with their mom in a rural environment in Idaho. They live in a beautiful community of families who care for each other and the world they are creating. Because my own calling is to work with those who have forgotten who they are, I live in an urban area. I see the contrast of where I live and their life and have such gratitude for their mom making their experience possible.
I also have deep gratitude for you awakening our hearts and souls to help us remember who we are.
One of my young red chickens was killed by a friend's dog when she was visiting my off-grid mountain fruit farm in Spain. We solemnly plucked and prepared the carcass. I cooked a simple stew with it and we shared it with the dogs. The sharing of that meal was precious and it healed my friend from the guilt she had been feeling. "I should have kept control of Amy!" she self-castigated. Amy was a beautiful, pure white whippet, a hunting breed which runs like a gazelle. My two shepherd dogs did not have the same instincts as Amy but they loved her unconditionally, even when she chased and murdered one of their flock. They ate side by side and we all cosied up together in front of a roaring wood fire. We did not plan for an event like that to happen. How could we have? We were so happy to see them, visiting from distant Toledo.
It is not for us to make plans or even contemplate visions of a better world. That is not our job. Nature herself has a plan enacted via her creations and, whether we know it or not, that plan is on target and on its own time. I am just enormously grateful to it for permitting me to be a part of it.
Long ago I lived in a beautiful rural place, lush and green and overflowing with every kind of wildlife imaginable. It was there that embodied life, mostly spent outdoors, was an everyday occasion. I now live in a small city which is surrounded by rural and wild places, but it does not call me outdoors as much, for all sorts of reasons. The city itself is choked with automobiles, and getting out of the city usually means using a car -- or risking becoming road kill on a bicycle.
Thanks for helping me appreciate how truly embodied life is almost always rural rather than urban.
Grief, suffering, beauty, gratitude. Connection and flow. We are being led to honor all of it; to dive deep into the flow of the deeper sacred, the mystery, since whether we agree to it or not, absolutely all of it is intricately and inseparably woven together in our experience here, together.
My own story, which may be of value if it resonates with some here:
My beautiful daughter, my free spirit and born-Bodhisattva, suffered a large stroke over a year and a half ago, just as she was finishing her first year of medical school residency, not long after her second Covid vaccination. She was a vibrant loving soul, world traveler, who brought dental care to remote Nicaraguan communities and was Iyengar-trained in India. Her plan was integrative medicine, and she insisted upon Ivy League for her undergrad and graduate work much as we tried to dissuade her. She accomplished all of this through hard work and all on her own, and was on the verge of professionally working to ‘hold the tension’ between the opposing poles of traditional medicine and alternative medicine when her world came crashing down. Our worlds came crashing down. She is, I thank God, still with us. We are presently facing the nightmare which is our health care system for those who are permanently disabled. She is now our entire family’s - along with much help from her many friends, old and new - precious but overwhelming daily and lifetime project. She remains a vibrant and loving soul. She is on the verge of better understanding what has happened to her but she may never really understand. The rest of us are exhausted, and have been immersed in deep grief and joy as we carry on, re-teaching her phonics, trying to both keep her safe but also freeing her up just enough to occasionally safely fail in case she is still able to relearn the lessons she once knew. We are not sure she can. She is still with us but we have lost her, both. We must remain vigilant but not. It’s been hell. We love her so. She has, my beautiful Bodhisattva, enabled us all, forced us all, to focus life in a new way - to work even more diligently and creatively than ever before toward what really matters.
I think there is a calling, a great awakening back to our rural roots. For some it may be a homestead, for others a backyard garden, or potted plants on the patio. This global insanity of chaos, is channeling a spiritual reawakening for those looking to wake up.
Oooooo. This essay is triggering for me. I did grow up in what you might call "reality," and it was brutal. We lived in a rural area, and my friends all raised cute little baby animals as part of 4-H Club. At the end of the season the animals were auctioned off for slaughter. It was meant to teach children to become detached and desensitized to killing animals for food.
I would often find wounded animals and baby birds that had fallen from their nests. I brought them to my parents begging them to help, and my father killed them. He wasn't mean -- he just didn't think there was any other option. But I was devastated. Instead of toughening me up it made me more sensitive and emotional.
I've been vegan most of my life, and I can't imagine eating an animal. I do my best to rescue all wounded and needy animals that cross my path. Sometimes there's nothing I can do, and it eats me up inside.
I guess the difference in your story is the reverence for the life of the fawn, and it wasn't needless killing. Sadly, most people don't treat animals that way.
Ahhh, tears as the fullness in my chest takes in this moment of those tender ones who gathered to honor the innocent new life that came into their hands so unexpectedly.
Though many mammals at different times have come before me at the time of their death, fawns by the roadside as well as dogs, cats, horses, cattle, wild ones, pets, birds and mice, I find this moment I have just experienced in reading about the reverence of those who honored Fawn powerful and true. It is a universal knowing of the precious gift of Life. The Sacred. It brings me to our Oneness, knowing each life is intrinsic to the Whole. Not greater, not better, not special, but equally necessary to the Whole. The Creator, God, Source, One, Great Spirit....the name is unimportant, the knowing is all important.
Right at this very moment, in a breathtakingly beautiful central European Land that is stretched across the ageless forest-Steppe and along the coast of the Black sea, between the Carpathians and the Urals, the Land that has the most fertile black soil, chernozem, the wonderous mineral treasures, and the kindest inhabitants; that used to have mighty industries that supported their homesteads—right now, the life like the one you described in this article, in that Land, has been shattered by bombs and smothered by the hatred and western propaganda that puppeteers the ruthless regime in Kiev. The Land, her fawns, and children have been shelled for the past eight years and not much is left of the homesteads and mighty factories; the meadows filled with zemljanika (wild strawberries) are covered with holes from shells and human bodies. While growing up in Moscow, I spent every summer of my childhood at the Black sea.
I don’t eat animals and the visual of slitting a baby deers throat brings me to tears. I could not do it myself and therefore, I could never eat it. At this point, what feels right- is to eat only what I could kill myself.
I would have done everything to try and save it and if nothing worked, honored the baby deer as it transitioned. Yet, these people sound like they’re spiritually connected to nature, so I’ll assume they followed what FELT right .
Thanks you Charles and friend. Yes, so precious this embodiment. And how sad the thought of it’s shift to the unnatural realm of bit and byte. And still I hold for the possibility that I’m unable to sufficiently understand this metaverse.
Yes, love the synchronicity...I'm just reading this book, "Deer man", by Geoffroy Delorme, a very tender story of a man who lived for seven years in the woods with deers, total immersion in the wild. The simplicity and the intimacy are such that I can only read a few pages at a time. The yearning in me is cutting deep, yet I know I will not leave for the woods, I don't have that kind of courage, or that kind of desperation. My encounters with the wild are on the edges.
thank you for sharing this story of the fawn. i , too, had an experience with a very young fawn this year. it got into my garden and could not find its way out. it allowed me to pick it up and bring it to it's mother. now i see that this fawn has two siblings. and i watch with such pleasure and gratitude as they run thru my woods. yes, the world has lost it's way, but i know that there is great light on this planet at this time and we can find our way back together.
My old neighbours were homesteaders. Their friends from the town asked them why they did what they did, it being so hard, or so it seemed to them.
'Because it's real.' She answered.
I read this and my heart opened with the truth revealed. I have two sons who live with their mom in a rural environment in Idaho. They live in a beautiful community of families who care for each other and the world they are creating. Because my own calling is to work with those who have forgotten who they are, I live in an urban area. I see the contrast of where I live and their life and have such gratitude for their mom making their experience possible.
I also have deep gratitude for you awakening our hearts and souls to help us remember who we are.
"I went on the search for something real. Traded what I know for how I feel."
About the grief for what we never had:
Jesus Loved the Wind
What is it about the wind, anyway?
It comes and goes like the things you missed out of the corner of your eye—
The things you wish you hadn’t forgotten:
Things that weren’t there when you woke up in the night, but you so wished they had been;
Things that once turned your heart upside down, making you stop in your tracks for just one second;
Things that you laid to rest and walked away, when it didn’t matter whether you looked back or not.
What is it about the wind anyway?
It cuts through the buttons on your coat, leaving the smell of wind in your clothes—
So that when you pass by, people pause for a moment without knowing why.
It bends things that have no choice but to bend, or else they’ll break.
It breathes over the hill and down, bringing a faint, thrilling breeze to where you sit, waiting.
It goes where you’ve never been, and where you’ll never go again, blowing past all your regrets.
What is it about the wind anyway?
It brings the most momentous messages, reminding you of all you know and all you never knew—
but always in a language you don’t understand.
What is it about the empty wind?
Why does it remember all the things that never came to be?
Why does it take all the truth you ever knew and sweep it away into the unfilled air?
Why does it chill the tears on your face, as if cold comfort is all it knows?
Why does it walk where it walks—
Down the turning years, and down the days of your life, always going past, never stopping?
It’s as if all the things we always knew were still things that we needed to be told—
As if Love, riding hidden in the wind, doesn’t care what we know and what we don’t.
One of my young red chickens was killed by a friend's dog when she was visiting my off-grid mountain fruit farm in Spain. We solemnly plucked and prepared the carcass. I cooked a simple stew with it and we shared it with the dogs. The sharing of that meal was precious and it healed my friend from the guilt she had been feeling. "I should have kept control of Amy!" she self-castigated. Amy was a beautiful, pure white whippet, a hunting breed which runs like a gazelle. My two shepherd dogs did not have the same instincts as Amy but they loved her unconditionally, even when she chased and murdered one of their flock. They ate side by side and we all cosied up together in front of a roaring wood fire. We did not plan for an event like that to happen. How could we have? We were so happy to see them, visiting from distant Toledo.
It is not for us to make plans or even contemplate visions of a better world. That is not our job. Nature herself has a plan enacted via her creations and, whether we know it or not, that plan is on target and on its own time. I am just enormously grateful to it for permitting me to be a part of it.
Long ago I lived in a beautiful rural place, lush and green and overflowing with every kind of wildlife imaginable. It was there that embodied life, mostly spent outdoors, was an everyday occasion. I now live in a small city which is surrounded by rural and wild places, but it does not call me outdoors as much, for all sorts of reasons. The city itself is choked with automobiles, and getting out of the city usually means using a car -- or risking becoming road kill on a bicycle.
Thanks for helping me appreciate how truly embodied life is almost always rural rather than urban.
Grief and its preciousness, thank you
Thank you.
Grief, suffering, beauty, gratitude. Connection and flow. We are being led to honor all of it; to dive deep into the flow of the deeper sacred, the mystery, since whether we agree to it or not, absolutely all of it is intricately and inseparably woven together in our experience here, together.
My own story, which may be of value if it resonates with some here:
My beautiful daughter, my free spirit and born-Bodhisattva, suffered a large stroke over a year and a half ago, just as she was finishing her first year of medical school residency, not long after her second Covid vaccination. She was a vibrant loving soul, world traveler, who brought dental care to remote Nicaraguan communities and was Iyengar-trained in India. Her plan was integrative medicine, and she insisted upon Ivy League for her undergrad and graduate work much as we tried to dissuade her. She accomplished all of this through hard work and all on her own, and was on the verge of professionally working to ‘hold the tension’ between the opposing poles of traditional medicine and alternative medicine when her world came crashing down. Our worlds came crashing down. She is, I thank God, still with us. We are presently facing the nightmare which is our health care system for those who are permanently disabled. She is now our entire family’s - along with much help from her many friends, old and new - precious but overwhelming daily and lifetime project. She remains a vibrant and loving soul. She is on the verge of better understanding what has happened to her but she may never really understand. The rest of us are exhausted, and have been immersed in deep grief and joy as we carry on, re-teaching her phonics, trying to both keep her safe but also freeing her up just enough to occasionally safely fail in case she is still able to relearn the lessons she once knew. We are not sure she can. She is still with us but we have lost her, both. We must remain vigilant but not. It’s been hell. We love her so. She has, my beautiful Bodhisattva, enabled us all, forced us all, to focus life in a new way - to work even more diligently and creatively than ever before toward what really matters.
I think there is a calling, a great awakening back to our rural roots. For some it may be a homestead, for others a backyard garden, or potted plants on the patio. This global insanity of chaos, is channeling a spiritual reawakening for those looking to wake up.
Oooooo. This essay is triggering for me. I did grow up in what you might call "reality," and it was brutal. We lived in a rural area, and my friends all raised cute little baby animals as part of 4-H Club. At the end of the season the animals were auctioned off for slaughter. It was meant to teach children to become detached and desensitized to killing animals for food.
I would often find wounded animals and baby birds that had fallen from their nests. I brought them to my parents begging them to help, and my father killed them. He wasn't mean -- he just didn't think there was any other option. But I was devastated. Instead of toughening me up it made me more sensitive and emotional.
I've been vegan most of my life, and I can't imagine eating an animal. I do my best to rescue all wounded and needy animals that cross my path. Sometimes there's nothing I can do, and it eats me up inside.
I guess the difference in your story is the reverence for the life of the fawn, and it wasn't needless killing. Sadly, most people don't treat animals that way.
Ahhh, tears as the fullness in my chest takes in this moment of those tender ones who gathered to honor the innocent new life that came into their hands so unexpectedly.
Though many mammals at different times have come before me at the time of their death, fawns by the roadside as well as dogs, cats, horses, cattle, wild ones, pets, birds and mice, I find this moment I have just experienced in reading about the reverence of those who honored Fawn powerful and true. It is a universal knowing of the precious gift of Life. The Sacred. It brings me to our Oneness, knowing each life is intrinsic to the Whole. Not greater, not better, not special, but equally necessary to the Whole. The Creator, God, Source, One, Great Spirit....the name is unimportant, the knowing is all important.
Thank you for this deep sharing, Charles.
It is a fine day to Remember. ❤️
Right at this very moment, in a breathtakingly beautiful central European Land that is stretched across the ageless forest-Steppe and along the coast of the Black sea, between the Carpathians and the Urals, the Land that has the most fertile black soil, chernozem, the wonderous mineral treasures, and the kindest inhabitants; that used to have mighty industries that supported their homesteads—right now, the life like the one you described in this article, in that Land, has been shattered by bombs and smothered by the hatred and western propaganda that puppeteers the ruthless regime in Kiev. The Land, her fawns, and children have been shelled for the past eight years and not much is left of the homesteads and mighty factories; the meadows filled with zemljanika (wild strawberries) are covered with holes from shells and human bodies. While growing up in Moscow, I spent every summer of my childhood at the Black sea.
I don’t eat animals and the visual of slitting a baby deers throat brings me to tears. I could not do it myself and therefore, I could never eat it. At this point, what feels right- is to eat only what I could kill myself.
I would have done everything to try and save it and if nothing worked, honored the baby deer as it transitioned. Yet, these people sound like they’re spiritually connected to nature, so I’ll assume they followed what FELT right .
Thanks you Charles and friend. Yes, so precious this embodiment. And how sad the thought of it’s shift to the unnatural realm of bit and byte. And still I hold for the possibility that I’m unable to sufficiently understand this metaverse.
Yes, love the synchronicity...I'm just reading this book, "Deer man", by Geoffroy Delorme, a very tender story of a man who lived for seven years in the woods with deers, total immersion in the wild. The simplicity and the intimacy are such that I can only read a few pages at a time. The yearning in me is cutting deep, yet I know I will not leave for the woods, I don't have that kind of courage, or that kind of desperation. My encounters with the wild are on the edges.